linger
by setaglow
Summary: Her decision to wait has nothing to do with a lack of love or desire. A missing moment one-shot set between "Old Dog, New Tricks" and "The Untitled Rachel Berry Project". Rated not for any actual happenings but for vivid ruminations. BTW - this is fadedcinder but I was having severe problems posting with my account and so I had to go and recover this one.


linger

Mercedes freezes in the process of rolling her shoulders back like she does on instinct every morning, shards of reality progressively puncturing past her early haze: Sam provides heat as efficiently as a furnace does (which she knew, before, just not as clearly as right now), she fell asleep on the couch watching _The Dark Knight_ with Sam after coming home from an evening of dancing her feet and booty off with their closest friends, his arms feel crazy delicious wrapped as they are around her, it's Friday, and... Mercedes can feel Sam lower down her body. The length of him a hard weight against her.

Long seconds pass without the slightest movement, and, telling herself to breathe in slow and steady, Mercedes starts trying to come up with ways to get out of her current situation as smoothly as possible. What she'll need to do is find her footing before sliding off the couch's thick cushions without changing her torso's position too much, which is not exactly the easiest feat due to her petite height and curvy physique.

But she doesn't get to it even after going through what would be the necessary motions inside her head. She wonders what's keeping her, and part of her tries to make the case that she's yet to take action because she doesn't want to either move in such a way so as to disturb Sam or to get her clumsy on and end up with her ass planted firmly on the floor, but, the truth is... — the truth is she's actually contemplating moving her hips back against him once before turning around and waking him up by finding his mouth with hers. Sam still has condoms stashed in his room, and just the idea of seeing him racing up the stairs to get to them at some speed only males about to have sex can manage makes Mercedes want to giggle in deep humor and love.

Because the heart of the matter is Mercedes really does love Sam. She _loves_ Sam. Irrefutable piece of evidence: she kinda even likes how he's kind of a morning person, which should be annoying but is not entirely so because his laidback silliness as they go about preparing breakfast has gotten her out of her morning funks plenty of times. Or: how she can't help but notice that, even when he's lost in Portal 2, he asks about her day, a practice that has resulted in him knowing the title to each song she's been working on as well as most of their hooks. Or: how he only forgets to take out the trash three out of seven times. And: how Mercedes can sit through incredibly suspect tv shows just because of Sam's outrageous take on them. Also: Mercedes loves _him_. What lies underneath all the colorful details that make up Sam's surface, the fact that he's an unlikely mix of a personality full of flair with the biggest heart pumping sturdy and warm as the motor keeping it all functioning. She likes the evident steel in him, the historical truth that this is a person who shouldered a man's weight when he was just a kid so his family could stay afloat.

That's one of the things with Sam, he keeps weathering storms you'd never suspect he'd weather.

Which goes a long way towards explaining why Mercedes has yet to start getting the hell off the damned couch: he's weathered her, living together and going on four months into their relationship, good moments and not so good ones, her lack of laughter after he goes hyper on the impressions when she's already bone tired following a tough day of recording, and her strong sass those three out of seven times he forgets about the trash, and, four days ago, his baiting her into a heated argument because of a bartender who showed some maximum interest in her (amazing) cleavage. And no sex to blunt all of these edges off.

Which brings Mercedes to another thing that goes a long way towards explaining why she has yet to start getting the hell off the damned couch: Sam has managed to make sex concrete for her. Before, ... she thought about the general _notion_ of sex, things like gravity tipping, passion fueled kisses and lots of caressing, and then (what she used to focus on) that afterglow of talking and laughing and just... — that palpable consciousness that you love, enjoy, and trust each other. But lately she's gotten into the habit of filling some other details in as well, so she thinks about Sam above her, likes to imagine how his arms would look if he were reigning himself in as he loved her thorough and deep, finds herself trying to conjure up what would play in his eyes if it were her above him, driving him closer with each movement. Right now she's thinking about how he would feel inside her, the stretch and rhythm to it, to him, her body already responding to both the reality of his length pressed against her and to the very vivid reel playing inside her head.

Somehow she knows sex with Sam would be a hot expedition into complete oblivion. Even if Santana hadn't dropped several comments accompanied by the requisite significantly charged looks about how Mercedes should be having a blast, Mercedes knows Sam enough to guess he must be a relentless hard worker when it comes to the physical. The responses he draws with just his hands on her breasts when she allows for it are a mix of almost embarrassing and definitely thought provoking enough that she finds herself still here. Still not moving. Still thinking about it, uncertain whether it's her feet or her hips she'll go with.

Maybe she's being too cautious with herself with her decision.

(Maybe she just _is_ pretty cautious with herself.)

Mercedes finds herself taking another calming breath before she's closing her eyes tightly, then she's whispering the shortest prayer because her feet have landed on the carpet and she's able to wiggle out of Sam's embrace without waking him up. She pauses as she's leaving, watches him for some long beats as she's level with the arm of the couch. Her fuzzy peach blanket, which should look ridiculous around him but doesn't, covers his body but not his face. Her throat gets tight for some unfathomable reason as her stare fixes over his closed eyes, so she instructs herself to return to the task of walking.

She pauses as she's about to vacate the room, goes back around and drops the softest kiss against Sam's forehead, somewhat glad when there's no reaction.

Later, even as she's going over the notes for a new song, Mercedes keeps getting caught in musings of maybe soon and forever and meaning and foundation and love and lust and the degrees that separate some of these. Thankfully Sam was so deeply asleep that he didn't wake up as she was dressing nor as she went about preparing breakfast; had he been there to cook his chocolate chip pancakes for her, her resolve might have gone from pretty thin to completely nonexistent, which would have led to them ending up a sated tangle draped over either one of their beds. And maybe that would only have been good for them, and so... — she really _hopes_ she's doing right by herself and by Sam when she sticks to what her conscience seems to be telling her, that she's actually building up to something significant instead of just standing motionless when moving in a desired direction would be a wiser path to follow.

~#~


End file.
